An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent relations ‘for free’, and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject's antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject's antecedent evidence.

中文翻译：

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想象力如何提供信息

对想象力认知能力的一个有影响力的反对意见认为，想象力是无信息的。你不可能从想象中得到比你投入的更多的东西，因此从想象中学习是不可能的。本文反对这种观点，认为想象力具有丰富的信息性。此外，它还捍卫了关于想象力如何提供信息的新颖解释，根据这种解释，想象力凭借其模拟表征格式而具有信息性。其核心思想是，模拟表示“免费”地表示关系，这解释了想象力如何能够包含比所输入的更多的信息。这一解释对心灵哲学和认识论都做出了重要贡献，前者展示了想象力如何产生不被主体先前心理状态所代表的新内容，后者通过展示想象力如何产生不被主体先前精神状态所赋予的新论证。先前的证据。